With the advance of electric equipment toward smaller size, lighter weight and higher performance, the semiconductor mounting technology has changed from the pin mating type to the surface mounting which now becomes the mainstream. One bare chip mounting technology is flip-chip (FC) mounting. The flip-chip mounting is a technique of providing an LSI chip on its circuit pattern-bearing surface with several to several thousands of electrodes, known as bumps, of about 10 to 100 microns high and joining the chip to electrodes on a substrate with a conductive paste or solder. Then the sealing material used for the protection of FC devices must penetrate into gaps of several tens of microns defined by bumps between the substrate and the LSI chip. Conventional liquid epoxy resin compositions used as the underfill material for flip-chip devices are generally composed of a liquid epoxy resin, a curing agent and an inorganic filler. Of these, the most predominant is a composition in which a large amount of inorganic filler is blended in order to provide a matching coefficient of linear expansion with those of semiconductor chips, substrates and bumps for increased reliability.
With respect to stress properties, the flip-chip underfill materials with high loading of filler give rise to no problem. However, they suffer from very low productivity since they have a high viscosity due to the high filler loading so that they may penetrate into the gap between chip and substrate at a very slow rate. There is a desire to overcome this problem.
In conventional liquid epoxy resin compositions used as underfill material, acid anhydrides are often employed as the curing agent. Since the acid anhydrides are hygroscopic, there arises prior to curing a phenomenon that a viscosity increase due to moisture absorption can cause varying infiltration or interrupt infiltration. Also, the acid anhydrides are likely to pick up moisture prior to curing and even after curing, subject to enhanced hydrolysis by virtue of ester bonds, both of which in turn can cause volumetric expansion, increasing the resistance at the interface between solder bumps and leads. This gives rise to a reliability problem.